How many rooms for rent are available in Carroll Gardens right now?
The gardens in the name are literal, and they explain the housing. A surveyor named Richard Butts laid the street plan out in 1846 and required front yards roughly 33 feet deep for the houses between Henry and Smith Streets, which is why the blocks of First through Fourth Place look unlike anywhere else in Brooklyn. What sits on them is two- and three-story row houses, so a room here means a bedroom on somebody's floor of a brownstone rather than a unit in a building. Roomster has 92 rooms across the neighborhood, nearly all inside ZIP 11231.
How much does a room for rent in Carroll Gardens cost per month?
Expect $1,300 to $2,000 a month for most rooms, which follows from what the apartments behind them cost: two-bedrooms in the neighborhood are quoted anywhere from $4,029 to $6,000 depending on which index you read, so a half-share lands between roughly $2,000 and $3,000 and a bedroom in a three-person household comes in below that. You can find rooms under $1,500 a month toward the Columbia Street waterfront, on the blocks running east to the Gowanus side of Smith Street, and south near Hamilton Avenue. The landmarked Place blocks and anything with a garden or a parlor floor sit at the top of the range.
Is a garden apartment room in Carroll Gardens legal to rent?
This is the question to ask here, because the neighborhood is full of below-grade rooms and New York draws a hard line through them. A basement, meaning a level with at least half its height above the curb, can be lawfully lived in and rented. A cellar, with more than half its height below the curb, cannot be a dwelling at all, and in one- and two-family houses a cellar is never legal to rent as an apartment. A lawful below-grade room also needs two ways out, ceiling height of at least 7 feet 6 inches in occupiable rooms, and proper light, air and sanitation. Look the address up on the Department of Buildings information system and read the certificate of occupancy, which says plainly whether that level is habitable.
Which Carroll Gardens blocks have the cheapest rooms to share?
Price tracks distance from the Place blocks. The historic district bounded by Carroll, President, Smith and Hoyt Streets and the deep-garden stretches of First through Fourth Place command the most, because those are the houses people move here for. Rooms get cheaper as you go west toward the Columbia Street Waterfront District, which the expressway cut off from the rest of the neighborhood, and east across Smith Street toward Gowanus. The blocks south toward Hamilton Avenue are the other value pocket. None of these are far apart on foot, so a fifteen-minute difference in walking can be several hundred dollars a month in rent.
Are Carroll Gardens rooms for rent near the subway?
Two stations serve the neighborhood and both carry the F and G. Carroll Street is the one most rooms are measured from, with Bergen Street covering the northern blocks. The third is a genuine curiosity: Smith-Ninth Streets sits 87.5 feet above the ground, the highest station in the New York City subway and the highest rapid transit station anywhere in the world from its opening in 1933 until 2022, built that tall so ships could pass beneath it on the Gowanus Canal. It is finally getting elevators for the first time since it opened. The F is your Manhattan train; the G never enters Manhattan at all, so check which one a room actually sits on before comparing prices.
Are utilities included in Carroll Gardens room rentals?
More often than in a modern building, and that is a function of the housing stock rather than generosity. These are row houses built in the 1860s through the 1880s and later divided into floors, so many of them still run on a single boiler for the whole house with no separate meter per apartment. Where that is the case, heat and hot water are usually folded into the rent because there is no practical way to split them. Electricity and internet are far more often billed separately, and cooking gas varies. Ask specifically which of the four are included and whether the house is on one boiler, since an old brownstone with poor insulation can carry a winter heating cost that materially changes what a room is worth.
